A large part of the things that give an aircrewman peace of mind is his faith in his pilot to do the right things at the right time in case of an emergency. The rest is just proficiency - can he get it up and get it down without bending something. I was one of those fortunate people who always seemed to be lucky enough to be teamed with a man who thought fast and reacted just as fast to situations that suddenly got out of hand. Case in point ---

We manned our aircraft for a pre-dawn heckler mission and trundled forward into position on the starboard cat. Everything went as usual, we got hooked up on the bridle, and were waved into full power. As the pilot told me later, he felt that things were not really right, for some reason that he wasn't sure of. In any event, he was alerted. As the cat slammed into us, what "wasn't right" became apparent. Neither of us had noticed that the aircraft had failed to settle down on the gear when tension was applied to the bridle, because no tension had been applied. The cat crew had hit us with a slack bridle. The shuttle took up the slack in a hurry, and had given us a fairly decent start down the deck for about half the distance necessary, whereupon all acceleration ceased. The bridle hooks had torn out of the wings, along with significant sections of the wing main spar. I couldn't see anything, but I could feel, and I knew for certain that we were definitely not going to get airborne that morning. I also knew that, if we went into the water, our life expectancy was measured in a very few moments. The water was very cold, there was no helicopter up, and the plane guard destroyer had zero chance of finding us in the dark before we froze. So, scared to death, I waited to feel the tail flip up as we fell off the bow. While I was waiting, my pilot was acting. He knew as well as I that we were not going to fly, and he did everything he could to stay on the deck. As soon as we lost acceleration, he chopped the throttles salvoed the bomb load on the deck and stood on the brakes, the left one harder than the right. I felt a sickening swerve to the left, heard a lot of screeching from the tires, and we came to a shuddering stop, albeit with a definite starboard list. I got out of the aircraft to see chaos everywhere. People were chasing rolling bombs, or being chased by them, and there were lights everyplace. I looked back at our aircraft, and saw it positioned broadside on the bow, at some ninety degrees to the cat, and the starboard list was due to the fact that the starboard main mount was about halfway down the bow round-down and about 12 inches from empty air. I went below to try to get my heart out of my throat and the vise out of my gut.

Later, I asked my pilot, "Why drop the bomb load ?" and he explained that if we went over the bow, as seemed probable, he didn't want the extra weight to pull us under any faster than if we were empty. Great idea, but for the wrong reason. With or without the bombs, we were just as dead, but shedding all that weight had also allowed us to shed a lot of momentum and had made the aircraft easier to stop. About 12 inches easier, in fact. It had made all the difference, that morning.

I was filled with admiration for this guy, and would have, (and did) follow him anywhere he wanted to go, no questions asked. Every aircrewman should be this lucky. Oh, he was anything but perfect, but he was my leader, even if he did things that I really didn't like. For instance, he seemed to take AA fire as a personal affront, and would attack any AA position that fired on us, provided there were no better targets around. I never thought that this course of action was going to prove to be too habit forming, but I guess we were lucky, because he silenced a lot of AA positions without getting us blown out from between our ears.